Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of semantic networks specifically relating to extracting syntactic and semantic content to derive a semantic network from a patent and carrying out a comparison between established patent documents and one or more patent submissions that require validation of claims. The process and method described herein establishes the process from which to extract relevant syntactic and semantic relationships to establish a difference in graph nodes between patents and patent applications.
Discussion of the Background
The present invention relates to the field of analytics, in particular to patent overlap identification and analysis or more precisely the obviousness in comparing a new submission with prior art.
Modern evaluation methods in this area perform analysis based on Boolean, vector space models, probabilistic models, latent semantic models, etc. These metrics abstract much of the relationships inherent in natural language narrative and leave the resulting score devoid elements and relationships that take advantage of the doctrine: “function follows form”. This methodology can be applied in idea conceptualization, patent analysis and infringement analysis. While previous art has tried to exploit to some extent such principle they only apply it to one level of analysis and leave multiple levels of analysis to explore. Function follows form in the context of patent narrative is the process of going from an abstract concept to a concrete invention description where the inventors role is to organize disparate ideas into a coherent functional or descriptive concept by providing “bindings” of unrelated concepts through union of a coherent relationships at different levels of abstractions. This concept is integrated into the “restricted” narrative order and format of a patent which has additional form that provides the functionality of a patent document which the examiner uses to evaluate the proposed invention. This second level of function follows form materializes through section restriction, order of presentation, and restriction of syntax. By analyzing these two levels of “function follows form” in patent documents, one can arrive at a useful method of analysis that can in turn be reduced to a method and processes of analysis that can be implemented in a computerized system. This method and process become analogous to the principles on which examiners analyze the obviousness of the patent in relation to another. The resulting method and process in a computerized system can in turn help attorneys, patent examiners, agents and interested parties in evaluating obviousness in a patent as well as the possibility of determining infringement of a patent.
The prior art can be established in one of several categories. The first category establishes statistical processes (frequency of words) to discriminate relevance of prior art and establish if a submission is similar in content. This category may establish, basic statistical mechanisms, weighted scores, statistical co-occurrences and latent semantic analysis among other techniques to establish relevance. (U.S. Pat. No. 8,060,505 B2; U.S. 2008/0195568 A1; U.S. 2008/0235220 A1; U.S. 2013/0132154 A1; U.S. 2013/0124515 A1; U.S. 2008/0288489 A1; U.S. 2010/0114587 A1).
The second category pertains in clustering and network analysis on established criteria to try to differentiate previous work from new work (U.S. Pat. No. 8,412,659 B2). A node structure of elements is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 8,423,489 B2. A related field is by analyzing patent blocks based on queries to show relationship between patent portfolios on graph mode (U.S. 2011/0246473 A1). A combination of the first category with the second category is given in U.S. Pat. No. 8,504,560 B2.
The third category uses search criteria based on regular expression and querying language such as Boolean expressions to search for relevant matches (U.S. 2013/0198182 A1) and to compare a target sequence and a sequence stored in a database. A conjunction method of comparison between claims in different patents matched against a database is described in U.S. 2011/0179022 A1.
The fourth category is to use an ontology to categorize patents is used in (U.S. 2013/0086070 A1; U.S. 2010/0131513 A1; U.S. 2013/0086045 A1; U.S. 2013/0086047 A1).
A fifth category creates ontologies automatically by using data. The ontology based method of creating data starts by first creating a lexical graph, then prominent terms are targeted and finally clustering is performed on the lexical graph (U.S. Pat. No. 8,620,964).
The shortcomings of the prior art is that it is either to restrictive such as using pre-established generic fields such as quantifying company name occurrences or inventors name frequency to gather into classes. On the other extreme there are processes where allow too much liberty (using Boolean operators) where the person looking for search matches requires to learn the workings of a good query to have successful matches. Other approaches such as statistical methods account for word occurrences, co-occurrences and mathematical formalism to carry out the search. These methods fall short because they do not exploit semantic relationships and structure of the patent document. No previous method explores the possibility of narrative to narrative comparison using graph theory.